266 RüdigerKunow
traditions.Religiousservicesareoffered;thefoodisethnicandprepared
with attention to culturally or religiously mandated dietary restrictions.
"Culture-sensitive" retirement homes are sometimes in self-gratulatory
fashionbilledasevidenceofthenewrespectaccordedtooldermigrants.
I want to offer a more skeptical view. "Culture-sensitive" retirement
homes, I propose, are expressions of the dominant trajectory of
caregiving in the Global North, which has "displace[d] the material
management of aging from the family to the state" (Lamb 216). Thus,
the decision to enter a care home (or to be put there by the family),
whichisalwaysadifficultone,isevenmoredifficultforethnicseniors.
Formanyofthem,"ethnicheritage,culture,religion,customsandrituals
are firmly embedded in [their] living arrangements" in the intimacy of
their homes (Mold et al. 108)—all of which they now have to leave
behind a second time. So, even when these "culture-sensitive" care
homes do in fact facilitate interaction between chronological and
cultural peers, they are also a site where various practices of
discrimination intersect—ethnic,age,andclass stereotypes—to produce
newstructuresofdiscriminationandexclusion.Inotherwords,whatold
peoplelivinginthesehomesareexperiencingnowinthefinalstagesof
their life course is not only totally different from their own former
expectations but often also their first and traumatic contact with the
Westernconceptoflatelife.
Asthesereflectionshaveshown,crossingoverintotheplaceswhere
"age" is can hardly ever be seen as a personal, let alone voluntary, act
but is instead determined by a broad variety of interpellating factors.
Margaret Gullette has come up with a memorable if also somewhat
melodramatic image of this changeover: putting people on an ice floe.
Theimagegoesbacktoa2006cartoonintheNewYorkerdepictingtwo
figures pushing a third onto a tiny floe of ice, in Gullette's informed
reasoninganiconicimageofthemassfiringofmidlifeemployeesinthe
early years of this century. As Gullette correctly points out, this is a
contemporary variant of an old but probably mythical story about the
voluntarydeathoftheelderinEskimo(Inuit)culture:
ThepointisthattheEskimogeronticidemythisproliferatingnow.Asan
agecritic,thetruthinessofthisstoryisimportanttomeandnotitstruth.
The ice floe bearing away a human being is a fantasy of a society in
which social murder or coerced suicide or voluntary self-extinction of